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EP 301 – Facebook Hacking For Your Note Business

Most of you are used to using Facebook to market, to post a picture, to post a cat video, to watch Scott’s webinars, to do a Facebook live video, but there are some other really cool tools that can be found with Facebook to really grow your business, to raise capital, to find asset managers, especially with the customize audience aspects. Who is your custom audience going to be? If you don’t have a large list, who should you market to? Over the years, Scott has spent a tremendous amount of time and money working on identifying his custom audience. He says you have to carefully scrutinize the people that you want to deal with. Scott breaks down some easy Facebook hacking techniques to help you raise capital and connect with your audience.

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Facebook Hacking For Your Note Business

This episode is something that we do on a pretty regular basis, but I didn’t realize how few people use what we’re going to talk about. We’re going to talk about Facebook Hacking Your Note Business. Most of you are used to using Facebook to market, to post a picture, to post a cat video, to watch my webinars, to do a Facebook Live video. There are other really cool tools that you can use with Facebook to really help you grow your business, to raise capital to find asset managers. There’s a great tool to use, especially with the custom audience aspects. What I thought I’d start with is a little story here.

Stalking Your Borrowers

The first thing that we use Facebook for a lot of time is we Facebook stalk our borrowers. I talked a little about this the on our Due Diligence for Dummies Webinar. You can catch that over at Note Night in America on iTunes or on WeCloseNotes.tv. What I’m talking about is once we get the borrower’s name, their state, we jumped on to Facebook and start looking to see if they have a Facebook profile. We use that information to try to find out if they’ve got a job in their profile, family members. You even could do the thing of messaging them trying to modify their loan or going to reinstate. I would prefer if you’re brand new to turn that over to a special servicer like Polaris or the Singer Law Group and went to one of their guys like Matt or Daniel go at it over there.

Facebook Hacking: The first thing that we use Facebook for a lot of time is we Facebook stalk our borrowers.

Our good friend, Cody Cox with Trinity, called me praising my name because the fact is in the three out of four notes, he actually contacted the borrower on Facebook. He sent them a private message and two out of three immediately returned his message and are setting up to do trial payment plans. He was all objective about and excited about that. You just have to be careful when you talk to the individual and you get him on the phone and say, “I’m a debt collector.” You’ve got to make sure to say those things in your messages when you’re talking to your borrowers as well. That’s one extra tip besides just stalking them and see what they’re doing or finding out what’s going on in their personal life.

We have found people that are going through their transitions. We’re talking like men becoming women. We’ve seen people where the mom is like, “Should we go to Disney World or we pay the mortgage? I guess, we’re going to Disney World.” We found also where the borrower bought a brand-new car and they were all excited about it in their Facebook page, and then they said they didn’t have any money when we got to phone with them. They had a big event, made a lot of money, but then they cried poor when we contacted them. Using the Facebook stuff helps you identify and see what stories are going on. It works best with your borrower somewhere between 35 and 55 or even 25 to 55. That helps dramatically as well. You can see sometimes we have found that people have hardships. That’s something to keep in mind. That’s one thing, Facebook stalking the borrower.

The second thing you can do with Facebook is something that most people aren’t doing. I’m always surprised at this because when I think back to what’s gone on with the election and everybody getting all upset about Cambridge Analytica scrubbing all this information, getting people to opt-in. What’s funny is you’re seeing Facebook really clamping down on their privacy features. Even I’ve noticed quite a bit of differences in how we post to our business page or that we can’t share something personal from my personal page to my business page. It’s a little bit difficult. We’ve got to simultaneously share to make it work through Live Leap or something like that. A couple of things that we use, Facebook has the ability for you to do a couple of things with custom list.

Many of you have a LinkedIn profile. Many of you hopefully are using that on a weekly basis to market for a variety of things. Either you’re contacting asset managers on there and using that to connect with asset managers or you’re also using it to expand your database of real estate investors because it’s very easy to go in LinkedIn and just do a search for real estate investors and start adding people, connecting with people. It’s one of the things that we had done to grow our database on LinkedIn over and doubling our connections from 6,000 connections to over 13,000 over the last five or six months. Why is that important? Why is LinkedIn important? If you did not know this, you have the availability to do a data download or export your connections. You can export all your connections from LinkedIn. If you get 10,000 connections on LinkedIn, you can export it so you have their first name, last name and email.

Setting Up Your Custom Audience

I know that’s really valuable information, not only for you to send an email blast out through MailChimp or Infusionsoft or some other CRM tool. It’s an extremely valuable list that you can also upload to Facebook to see if those people that you’re connected to on LinkedIn have a Facebook account using the same email. Let me give you an example. I have a personal email, 1ScottCarson@Gmail.com, for one of the emails that we have obviously known for you at ScottCarson@WeCloseNotes.com. If I have a business profile on LinkedIn, Scott@WeCloseNotes.com is the email you use for that, but my Facebook email that I have account with, 1ScottCarson@Gmail.com. It won’t identify me in a way that when you upload the list to Facebook and you go to your business page and it’s a little bit different when you just want to find where you can add custom audiences in your business profile.

You may need to create a business profile. It’s easy to do and cheap but it allows for you to import a custom audience. What’s golden about this is you only need to upload the email addresses. What you do is you strip your lists downs so you have one column of just pure email addresses. You can also take any other database you have, business cards and other people you’ve met and do the same thing. Upload your custom list of your contacts in as a custom audience as well. What Facebook will do, it will identify that email and see if there’s a profile that has that email and match the two together. One thing that you can also do that most people miss out on, if you’ve got a list of phone numbers of your contacts, cell phone numbers, regular phone numbers. You can also upload a list of just phone numbers and it will identify your list of phone numbers with anybody that has a Facebook profile with that same phone number and match it up.

We just did this again for my recent Fast Track. I was showing them how we do this and so I took my 13,000 contacts that I have LinkedIn, I uploaded the list in the custom audience thing. Let me give you an example here. I’ve got my Scott Carson and a few other websites that I run. I see business manager at top side of the screen. It shows on the left-hand side. I click on that, I click on audiences and now what you’ll see are the audiences that I’ve uploaded or created over the weekend. I click on June 2018 connections, just emails and I uploaded 13,300 of the emails into Facebook and out of the 13,330, 9,400 have a Facebook profile. I can market directly to those clients, directly to those individuals. Target them directly with either images or videos. I can say, “Just market to these people once a week.”

Facebook Hacking: Many of you have a LinkedIn profile. Many of you hopefully are using that on a weekly basis to market for a variety of things.

I can make it look like you can’t get rid of me if you’re on LinkedIn. Another thing that’s also really nice to do is to do what’s called a look-a like audience. What we do is we click on a look-a like audience and then we identify my June 2018 connections email and it takes a look at all the characteristics of those 9,400 people and it goes out and finds other individuals out there that had those same characteristics. The average age, average potential income, average education, average interest, average key words. We identify narrow it down keywords. You can see that there is a look-a like audience of 2.1 million real estate investors across United States that I can mark it to the head of the same. It’s not exact interest but pretty much same similar interests and I can do the same thing.

Deal Flow, Email Newsletter, and a Video

I can set up a similar ad that I’m running to my LinkedIn connections to these people as well. I know that’s a little bit scary, especially when you think of they’re going to pull up information, average age, average income, average interests, and identify. You’ll start seeing the ads pop up, but this is what happens. This is all the information you have on Facebook that allows you to really scrub and pull some great information out there, for those that are looking to grow your business. If you don’t have a database, you can create one very easy. One thing you may want to do, we were talking about this with people, is if you’ve got a MailChimp or Infusionsoft is creating a custom list. Whereas if you post maybe a photo of a property you’re working through. You posted in Facebook there and say, looking for assets for your deals or looking for above average returns. Click here to get on my buyers list. They clicked on the link, it takes them directly to your customers list in the MailChimp or all you want them to do is put your first name, last name, email, and cell phone number. Really that’s about it or just first name, email and cell phone number.

Through marketing we found that often just the less you ask people to put the better. Email, cell phone and first name are often what all you need really to get rock and rolling. Obviously, you want to have something that you can send out to these people afterwards. Deal flow, email newsletter, maybe a video. That’s another thing you do as well. You can upload a video to Facebook that targets directly to your audience. “Facebook and LinkedIn friends, it’s great to connect with you. I’m Scott Carson, the note guy. Just wanted to drop you a quick message. If you’re an active real estate investor looking to do more deals but are having a hard time striking out all the time, why don’t you just click on the link below. I’ll send you an email of what we do as note investors or I’ll send you my free eBook or I’ll say my free reports on what we do as note investors to help us find hundreds if not thousands of deals for our own portfolio.” Something simple, something short and sweet.

You want the video to be less than two minutes, but you want to upload directly to Facebook and then you can target directly to these individuals. If you’re looking at my page, you see there’s a look-a-like US audience. It’s within 1% of my connections. You can spread out how separate, how big are the list is, degrees of separation, but the smaller the list, the more accurate you can be with your marketing. That’s really important to do for you to do that. That’s one of the great things about using Facebook smartly and I know many of you are in it all the time because I see you commenting on every post we have, but using that custom audience to create an ad. I uploaded a lot of different lists to my thing. I’ve had people give me their list. I uploaded a list like you see here, Note Camp emails.

I uploaded 1,500 names from my Note Camp Workshop and then less than a thousand people actually had Facebook profiles with those emails. That’s not a surprise because it’s a smaller list. I pulled a list of IRA investors in Clark County of 5,000 emails. Out of 5,000, IRA owners, 3,900 of them had a Facebook profile at that email. That’s one thing to think about it. If you’ve got a list of IRA investors, you’ve worked hard networking or you’ve purchased a list, oftentimes, when you buy a big list of names, it’s hard to import those into your CRM without shutting your MailChimp or Infusionsoft account down because it’s a new list. The best thing you could do when you import that list is only send an email out to like 500 of those people at a time.

That way if you do get heavy spam, you only lose 500 not 5,000. Another smart thing to do is upload the list into Facebook here, just the emails or the phone numbers and send out marketing that way. Get people opt-in that way. It’s relatively cheap, inexpensive. You’re only dealing with the people you want to deal with versus clogging up and getting charged for extra contacts in your CRM that really aren’t going to open your email anyway. You’re all going to see about somewhere between 8% to 20% open rate on cold lists, depending on the size. The bigger the list, the lower open rate. That’s a great way to do that on a regular basis to help you have something you can market to and really Cambridge Analytica, Facebook for you.

If you don’t have a list and you have a new LinkedIn account, you go in and identify a custom audience right down to city, state interests, income levels, that stuff. One of the things that we talked about is what is your custom audience look like? If you don’t have a large list, who should you market to? Over the years, we have spent a tremendous amount of time and money working to identifying our custom audience or as you will be able to say in the business, avatar, who are note investors, who are the real estate investors, who are the people that you want to deal with. If you know this information, you can go on and create a custom audience that matches this up through Facebook to identify and target the right people, $10 a day, $50 a day with ads that play on a regular basis and it’s extremely effective and extremely cheap to do so as well.

Narrowing Down the Focus

Who is our custom audience? Let’s think about this. Obviously, they have an interest in real estate but let’s start with the basics. They’re adults, age group, I would say between 35 to 65. Facebook likes to auto-populate eighteen to 65 plus and you don’t want to do that. That’s too wide an audience. There’s nothing against youths, but you really probably don’t want to target anybody below 35. They just haven’t had the time to work. They don’t really probably have a lot of savings and they just aren’t serious about whether wanting to go. If you narrow it down to 35 to 65, you have a bunch of targeted audience.

Probably a homeowner, college educated, nothing against anybody who didn’t go to college, but it’s just a little higher degree when it comes to and narrows that magnifying glass down to Facebook. Homeowner, college educated, making between $75,000 and $250,000 a year and you can actually pick the income levels of the people that you target to. You can also pick their interests. What we have found is people that obviously have interest in real estate, cashflow, retirement, IRA. You could even pick some interesting targets if you need to, specific companies if you want to. They are interested in fix and flips or names out there. You can target their interest.

The beautiful thing is when you start narrowing down the focus, Facebook will start showing you how big their audience is. Do you want to do it by the whole country or do you want to narrow it down to Texas? Do you want to narrow it down to Dallas? Do you want to narrow it down to zip code? The idea that the more niche-y that you can be, the more narrow-focused you are. I wouldn’t go above the whole country. I would stick to the state because then you can customize it a little bit better for your marketing. Are you in Texas having a hard time finding deals versus are you having a hard time to finding deals? Gary Vaynerchuk shared the key to his early success the fact that he would customize his Facebook marketing to people that graduated from Princeton, graduated from Yale, “Did you graduate here and interested in wine, get 20% off your shipping or get 20% off your order. Are you a real estate investor in Baltimore? Are you a real estate investor in an Austin?”

Those things can help you really target that audience there locally. It doesn’t mean you’re running more ads instead of doing something the whole state. You’re also much more specifically targeting the right individuals that you want to deal with on a regular basis. The thing about LinkedIn, your LinkedIn list is a great list to have to uploading to your email. The reason I like uploading my list to LinkedIn is obviously by sending email out, you’re going to unsubscribe. That’s fine. Let them unsubscribe. I don’t care. I don’t need to be charged for that email that is going out. The thing when you upload them to Facebook, they still may see you. They can only hide that ad or unsubscribed from that ad basically and it’s completely fine. It’s a pretty advanced strategy to help you in your note business.

Facebook Hacking: You may need to create a business profile. It’s easy to do cheap but allows for you to import a custom audience.

Going back to the Facebook stalking, I just put the borrower’s name, plus the city state to track it down. You often get four or five different things. You can see oftentimes where they live, where they work. We use LinkedIn a little bit to stalk if our borrowers are 35 or plus. A lot of times they may have a LinkedIn profile that we’re going to get a photo, a profile, find out their existing job and then you can also make a phone call to see if that’s an actual working number a lot of times. Somebody asks, “Does this require a Facebook business page? Yes. They’re free to have. You could do this through your business profile. The marketing side of this is so much cheaper than direct mail plus the fact that you’re hitting 3,000, 4,000. They’ll tell you based on what your budget is, how many people you’ll hit a day too. That’s also an effective use of your marketing.

Your ad will be seen by 3,500 people or your ad will be seen by 5,000 people or your ad will be seen by 700 people. I would not do postcards. The only time postcards or doing direct mail is if I’m mailing out to IRA owners who have a self-directed IRA who have closed on a deal that you’ve looked at county records. If you’re buying a list of IRA investors or just a generic list of 401(k) investor from like Melissa Data or something like that, target those people. They may be a little bit harder to target because they may not be real estate investors because they may not have a self-directed IRA, but it’s still a target rich environment. People that are making money but don’t have the time.

What cracks me up though is all have been out of shape. If you think back to all the stuff about Cambridge Analytica and now that company’s out of business or closing its doors, this is the stuff that we do on a regular basis. I can go online and pick as many as a Republican or Democrat interest and target them directly with an ad or a video. It’s not that hard to do. It’s easy to do to target. They’re a real estate investor. They have an interest in real estate. There are so many things you can do with this to help you in your note business if you just take the time to work through it.

Facebook Marketing Techniques

The tricky part is when you post a photo or post a video, what you don’t want to have happen when you post a picture is you have to have less than 25% script in or text in the image. If you’re more than 25%, often your photo will be declined and you better go back and recreate it. This is why you often see pictures of people or landscapes or something like that in these targeting ads because it’s just an ad to make it easy. I want to see what that pretty girl looks like or what that guy looks like. That’s important. With your videos, you don’t want your image to have a lot of script and a lot of text in there as well. You want to make sure basically it’s you talking and maybe your name comes across the bottom. Something simple that you can do with BeLive or Zoom like we’re doing as well. Something to share. I wouldn’t want to have my logo in the background when I’m talking for the most part, doing a video like that. It would identify that and probably not like it too much.

You can use these Facebook hacks to help you grow your business. We use it in the note business, to track down borrowers and Facebook stalk to find out what their country western song is, what kind of story. Along with using the same thing to upload our lists from LinkedIn, from our contact list, from any large lists or to create an audience if we don’t have a list of people that we’re looking for. I was able to narrow down a 1% audience, 1%-degree separation from my 13,000 LinkedIn connections. Out of that 13,000, 9,400 of them have basically a Facebook profile that I can target to on a regular basis.

Very easy, if you’re looking for some help on Facebook marketing, I would check out the guys at Digital Marketer in Austin. They do a really good job, a lot of educational stuff. There are a ton of videos out there as well. Something you can do at $10 a day, $30 a day, literally feed people into your website, your video stream, anything that you can do like that to help drive the audience. Hopefully this has been helpful for you guys. It’s designed to give you a little bit of a different look on things. I honestly think this is one of the smartest things you can do, especially if you have a budget or you’re bootstrapped running an ad for a week for $100.

Create an ad, run an ad to get people opt-in, raise capital. If you’ve got a really good deal, you’ve funded or bought or in the process fixing or flipping or something like that, I know we’ve got some fix and flippers watching right now, or wholesalers posted on there. Especially if you’re in an aggressive market like Dallas, you could go on and post an ad, “Get this amazing deal at 50% of value or 60%,” or what it is. You put the word because it allows you to put a little description below your Facebook ad, “Get this amazing deal. Click here to get the details emailed to you.” Once you get somebody to click on there and their information is a part of your database, then that becomes a very valuable tool.

Work smart, don’t work harder. It’s one of the things that we have done for years, growing our audience and also targeting for our classes, our deals and things like that and raise a lot of capital off of it. The idea is just get them to opt-in. Give them something: an eBook, a one-page report, some of your case studies. People love case studies, “Click here to get my case study report.” That’s a really good thing that you can do as well. Do this in your business. Play around with it. If you’re on Facebook all day long, make it useful, not a waste of time by just commenting, liking, poking or sharing cat videos. Just spend a little time on it and it will be well worth your time. Have a great day. Go out, do something and we’ll see you all at the top.